


Recursion

by kathryne



Category: Sanctuary (TV)
Genre: Community: sanctuary_bingo, Episode Related, Episode: s03e19 Out Of The Blue, F/F, F/M, Merry Month of Masturbation Challenge 2012, Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-04
Updated: 2012-06-04
Packaged: 2017-11-06 19:26:02
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,478
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/422349
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kathryne/pseuds/kathryne
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helen Druitt rifles through the materials of her history.  Set in the AU from 3x19, "Out of the Blue," prior to the events of that episode.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Recursion

**Author's Note:**

> Written for the "Five Senses (One or All)" square on my sanctuary_bingo card. Originally supposed to be for the Merry Month of Masturbation, but, well, timing. 
> 
> Thanks to Sophie Grace, as always, for making it better.

She squeezes the excess paint off her brush and rolls a final thin line onto the canvas, highlighting the underside of a cloud. The touch of white brings the shadows into sharp relief, suggesting the hidden sun, and Helen wonders for a moment whether the light is passing or about to return.

No matter: the ambiguity is pleasing. And the painting is done. She doesn't bother re-examining the completed work; she knew what she wanted to do and is confident she's managed it. Instead, she drops the brush into the tub and carries it out to the sink in the back garden. 

Usually the ritual calms her. Cleaning the brushes, trimming the misaligned bristles, scraping the palette – it all helps her to let go of the fervour that sees her though to the end of a work. Not this time. Even when everything is laid out to dry, she is still twitchy and unsettled. This is the first painting she's completed since John left. The relief is overwhelming.

Maybe she should call George, tell him that she'll have something for him soon after all. She dries her hands and grabs her mobile. _00:43_ , the screen flashes, and she blinks. She's lost hours to this canvas. Even George, used as he is to dealing with artists, won't appreciate a call now. 

And – she winces; she'd better turn down the music, unless she wants Doctor William Sodding Zimmerman at her door bright and early to lecture her on how his wife needs her sleep. Doesn't the bloody man know that music is important for fetal development, stimulating the brain, improving spatial awareness – 

She pauses. How does she know that?

Must've read it in the paper somewhere, she thinks, and dismisses it from her mind.

So who can she call? She weighs the mobile in her hand, considering. She wants to reach out and share this miracle: John took the family silver, the piano, her self-sufficiency, but he hasn't taken her creativity. 

She scrolls through her contacts list, but it's full of people she hasn't spoken to in months, friendships she shouldn't try to rekindle in the dark of the night. The rest are people she knows through John, stiff society wives and husbands who wear Armani like armour. She presses the heels of her hands against her eyes until she sees swirls of blue in the blackness inside her head.

Well. She'll go out, then. Find an all-night coffeeshop downtown and watch the art students doing the same dance she did so long ago. She needn't speak to anyone, but right now she doesn't want to be alone. 

There's an unaccustomed lightness to her step as she darts upstairs, tugging off her paint-smeared cardigan. She can almost smell the scent of coffee roasting, bitter and comforting. Or perhaps she'll have a cup of tea, she thinks, the aroma of Darjeeling a half-remembered friend.

She throws open the doors to her closet and nearly staggers at the sight. Her clothes take up less than half the space. The other half, empty, screams a mocking reminder. These moments keep ambushing her all over the house, his absence almost stronger than his presence had been.

"Damn you anyway, John Druitt," she says, dropping her cardigan defiantly on the floor under the empty space. She kicks her jeans off after it, leaving her in a white tshirt and cotton pants. The disorder would have angered him; everything in its place, even if that place was the laundry hamper, that was John's way. She bares her teeth in a fierce grin, thinking of the mess in the downstairs lounge and how he'd hate it.

She runs her hand along the hanging rod, spreading the clothes out with a screech of metal on metal. The closet still looks sparse, but that just gives her room to search through for particular pieces. Grabbing a few at random, she turns and throws them on the bed.

The bed stops her again. She hasn't slept up here since it happened, preferring to catnap on the sofa, and the duvet still bears the perfect creases and hospital corners of which John was so fond. He made their bed in the morning and tipped her world upside down in the afternoon. 

" _Damn_ you, John," she whispers again, hands clenching into impotent fists. Her gaze falls on a green blouse he bought her to wear to one of his business dinners; she still remembers the feel of the silk whispering across her shoulders as she shrugged it on, and later, as John slid it off. Growling, she rips it off the hanger and balls it up, flinging it – and its memories – across the room. It hangs haphazardly off the headboard and she reaches automatically for the next piece, white linen trousers that wrinkle the instant she touches them, and the next, until she catches her breath and looks at the carnage she's wrought.

The mess of clothes in the middle of the mattress is a start, but she needs something more. Cursing, she claws at the sides of the bed, ripping up sheets and duvet in a rage. She knocks the mound of decorative cushions to the floor, throwing his pillow after them, and crumples the sheets in her fists, drawing them up into creases and lines. The duvet she piles on one side of the mattress, letting it dangle untidily off the edge. Rage edges her vision, blue light narrowing her periphery. If John were there, she might hit him; as it is, she vents her anger on their marriage bed. 

Finally, panting, she stands back and surveys her handiwork. The bed looks like it has been the site of an orgy, and she is well satisfied. She sprawls across it sideways, pillowing her head on the crumpled duvet, and catches her breath. Adrenaline is still rushing through her veins, tasting bitter copper on her tongue. She wants to run, or scream, or give in and cry in frustration. She won't do any of those things, won't give him the satisfaction. Even if he's not here to see it, she has to believe that she's all right without him. She doesn't need him. Even here, she thinks with a jolt, she doesn't need him. Even here.

She stretches out, wiggling against the sheets, letting the sensations wash across her skin. The soft texture of her favourite jumper brushes against her hip and she draws it to her cheek. It was Irene's, decades ago; Helen found it mixed in with her own wardrobe after uni, whether by accident or design she never knew. She inhales as if she might still smell the spice of Irene's perfume on the night of the college ball their second year, when Irene had wrapped it around her shoulders and kissed her on the banks of the Isis. Helen shivers, drawing one hand over the rough cotton of her shirt and letting it rest on her belly. 

Irene. Irene would have answered her call at half one in the morning. 

She would have come over and pressed Helen down onto the disheveled bed, laughing her musical laugh – practiced, but no less beautiful for its artifice. They'd lain together in tangled sheets so many times, Helen sketching perspective studies while Irene hummed librettos under her breath, until one of them grew bored and distracted the other.

Helen lets her fingers stray down over her pants, cupping herself gently, remembering the heady, tiny world that had been taking an arts degree at Oxford. They'd banded together in that relentlessly academic world, the artists and the actors, and she and Irene had blazed an unrepentant trail through Hilary and Trinity terms that year. God, they'd been brazen; she remembers bringing Irene off with her fingers against the green room door during the end-of-year gala, then watching her perform minutes later, her knickers still in Helen's handbag. Helen sighs at the memory and brings her other hand to her breast, pinching her nipple and hissing softly. They'd been so good together, she and Irene.

And then had come the summer, and John, and when third year had started he'd drawn her out of the artists' bubble and into his own circles. By the end of Michaelmas term she and John had been exclusive and she'd rarely seen even her coursemates save in preparation for their degree show. She'd missed that end-of-year gala in a flurry of finishing paintings, set up by the window in John's flat so he could ply her with food and coffee, and though they'd all gone to the show John had stuck to her like a burr, beaming with pride.

Where had Irene gone after graduation? Some opera company in Europe, Helen vaguely remembers, and from there who knew. She wrinkles her nose in disgust and balls the pullover up, tucking it under her neck. She won't think of that loss now, nor of John, just of herself.

The tangle of sheets and the music drifting up the stairs reminds her of her first flat outside of halls, a tiny hole on the north edge of London that had been all she could afford as she tried to make a name for herself after uni. John's firm had sent him to Singapore and she'd declined to go with him, choosing instead to focus on getting work done for her first real agent.

James had been a friend of John's first, but he'd taken Helen on for her own merits; she'd always been sure of that. He would have answered her call, too, day or night. 

They'd celebrated wildly when James had finally managed to open his own gallery in Soho – a tiny space, true, but with her paintings in pride of place and more other interested artists than they'd had room to show. He'd built the space and wired the lights himself, and though he hadn't asked she'd painted the walls, laughing and laughing as he made jokes about how the blank white spaces would be worth more than the canvases hanging on them.

He'd always known just how to make her laugh, James had, and she'd taken him to bed for that more than anything else. The first time they'd tumbled – laughing – onto piles of dropcloths in the gallery's back rooms, champagne in hand and still giddy from that first night's success. Even drunk he'd learned her body quickly, fingers rough with calluses from building a space for her work. 

Helen wiggles out of her underwear and runs two fingers along the inside of her thigh and up to her clit, remembering the pressure of James' touch, the teasing tone of his voice and the lime-and-pepper smell of his old-fashioned cologne as he leaned over and slid his fingers into her. Her hips twitch and she clenches around nothing; she bites back a moan even though there's no one to hear it.

James liked that, sometimes, when she held her breath, liked teasing her until she came whimpering against his mouth, all the stronger for the effort of keeping silent. But he liked hearing her talk, too. He liked describing all the inventive things he planned to do to her, and she liked watching his breath catch and his jaw clench as she told him just how he was making her feel. She tries to capture that now, letting her breathing harshen, letting its rough texture fill the air and mix with the music still drifting through the door. Her heart is racing as though she's been running from something.

She takes a deep breath, slows, stops; rests one hand over her breast almost protectively. She can feel her heart beat, erratic against her palm, and from the corner of her eye the doorway looks more shadowed than it should. She swallows and starts to roll over, to sit up, but then she thinks: so what? So what if John walks in, right now? This is her bed, now, her home and her life.

She lies there, feeling her heart race, and remembers meeting Amelia.

She remembers standing on the beach, studying the light on the grey water and the indistinguishable horizon with the same devotion, remembers being startled out of her reverie by Amelia's whooping descent. She remembers Amelia landing, windswept and ruddy-cheeked, grabbing Helen's hand and saying _By god, feel my heart go. How about you, you want to come for a ride?_ Helen laughed. _It'll take a lot more than that to get me to jump off a cliff._ Amelia grinned, pressing Helen's hand to her chest. _The freefall and the view, sea and sky coming together – there's no rush like it._ Helen snorted. _None?_ And she slid her hand down, just a bit, and Amelia smirked up at her through pale lashes. _Well, nearly._

Kissing Amelia was like watching her leap off those cliffs and be gone, glider's black wings wiggling against the grey-blue of the Pacific and Helen's stomach swooping in sympathy. She feels that dip now. The memory of Amelia's eyes, bracketed by crows'-feet from squinting into the sun, sends a shiver down her spine that tips her head back and draws her hand straight to her cunt.

Amelia and the way she shouted when she came; James and the prickle of his beard on her breasts; Irene and the taste of her, perfume and musk smeared across Helen's lips and tongue. Memories swirl behind Helen's closed eyes, ice-blue fragments of thought spiralling out into infinity-circles painted on the inside of her eyelids. She gasps and presses harder against herself, inside herself, focused now; her other hand holds her hair back and off her flushed face, heat like a spotlight growing behind her eyes. James' laugh, rough as his fingers. Irene's long nails trailing over her ribs. Amelia's scent, like the sea she flew over.

She comes in a rush, blue light sparkling, back arched and body taut and tremors quivering from under her fingers right out across her skin. She's not sure what memory pushes her over the edge, or even what name she calls out, but when she curls back into the tangled mess of sheets, she feels cleansed. Spreading her arms, she smiles at the ceiling, enjoying the decadent rush of endorphins. It strikes her that this might be the first time she's relaxed since John left – but even that thought doesn't hurt as much as it once did.

The world seems full of possibilities, and Helen's not sure which to grasp at first. She washes her hands, trades her sweaty tshirt for Irene's jumper and an old pair of jeans, and starts small: first, a coffeeshop; tomorrow, maybe, some long-overdue phone calls. 

She takes the stairs quickly, ignoring the voice in the back of her head telling her she'll never make those calls. If she tries, she can be happy here on her own. Somehow.


End file.
